We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method

Publisher's Summary

Southern California - sunny days, blue skies, neighbours on flying bicycles ... ghostly submarines ... mermen off the Catalina coast ... and a vast underground sea stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Inland Empire where Chinese junks ply an illicit trade and enormous creatures from ages past still survive. It is a place of wonder ... and dark conspiracies.A place rife with adventure - if one knows where to look for it. Two such seekers are the teenagers Jim Hastings and his friend, Giles Peach. Giles was born with a wonderful set of gills along his neck and insatiable appetite for reading. Drawing inspiration from the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Giles is determined to build a Digging Leviathan. Will he reach the center of the earth? or destroy it in the process?

See More Like This

People who bought this also bought...

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful

By
Katherine
on
03-20-15

Dreamy, peculiar, sweet

3.5 stars. Originally posted at Fantasy Literature.

The Digging Leviathan is the first book in James P. Blaylock’s LANGDON ST. IVES/NARBONDO series. I’ve been reading these out of order, which doesn’t seem to matter. The books have some overlapping characters, settings, and/or concepts, but each stands alone. The Digging Leviathan features two teenage boys, Jim Hastings and Giles Peach, who are living on the coast of Southern California during the mid-20th century. Each is a dreamer and each has his own “issues” involving his father.

Jim lives with his uncle Edward St. Ives (who, I’m assuming, is a direct descendant of Langdon St. Ives, the eccentric Victorian scientist who stars in several of the books in this series) because Jim’s mother is dead and his father is insane. (Or is he?) Most of the time Jim’s father lives in a mental hospital, but when he manages to escape (a regular occurrence), he comes home until Dr. Hilario Frosticus (one of Dr. Narbondo’s incarnations, I presume) manages to find him and take him away again. While at home, Jim’s dad oversees animal experiments which he hopes will support his peculiar theories about evolution and civilization. He’s also trying to get a short story published in Analog.

Giles’ father, on the other hand, has been missing for years. Giles, who has webbed fingers and a set of gills on his neck, suspects that his dad turned into a fish and swam down a subterranean aquatic tunnel which leads to the center of the earth. Desperately trying to find his father, Giles is building a tunneling machine called The Digging Leviathan. Jim doesn’t believe Giles, of course. He thinks Giles gets his bizarre ideas from all the Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jules Verne novels he reads. But, strangely, other men are interested in Giles’ plans. Some hope to use Giles’ machine to discover the secret to immortality. Some are afraid that Giles will destroy the earth. Do they have some reason to believe that Giles is on to something?

What I’ve described is the essential plot of The Digging Leviathan, but readers who are familiar with James P. Blaylock won’t be surprised to be told that it doesn’t seem like this book was written for the main purpose of telling a story about tunneling to the center of the earth. Instead, Blaylock uses the plot as an excuse to entertain us with the antics of his quirky but loveable characters and, perhaps, to touch our hearts as we watch two boys longing for a “normal” relationship with their fathers.

Blaylock’s funniest character is Jim’s father who seems like (but maybe isn’t) a paranoid schizophrenic. He believes that his neighbor — a little old lady in curlers and a bathrobe — is conspiring against him with the gardener. He imagines that every night they hoist her dog over the fence so it can defecate in the Hastings’ yard. He also suspects that the man who drives the ice cream truck is a spy. In the backyard shed, Jim’s father attempts to breed mice and axolotls, hoping he can get the mice to devolve into an aquatic species. He dresses them in doll clothes to test his Civilization Theory. Mr. Hastings’ ideas are funny to consider and Blaylock gets to send escaped dressed-up axolotls running through some of his scenes. Hilarious!

Creating and entertaining us with his neurotic characters is what Blaylock does best. As if they’re in a Monty Python sketch, they’re constantly (and I’m taking these verbs right out of the story) dashing, springing, jumping, cursing, tripping, lurching, falling, stumbling, spying, sneaking, creeping, lurking, and peering in windows. Readers who love John Cleese’s brand of humor will probably be delighted with The Digging Leviathan (and the other LANGDON ST. IVES books). Readers who don’t, probably won’t. I do love Blaylock’s sense of humor, though I have to say that the silliness goes on a little too long in several scenes of The Digging Leviathan.

There’s more to The Digging Leviathan than the quirkiness I’ve described. The story is also about familial love. It was the loss of Jim’s mother that probably sent his father over the edge. The bond that Jim and his father still have, and Giles’ desire to find his own father, is sweet and poignant.

I listened to Audible Studio’s version of The Digging Leviathan. It’s 10.5 hours long and performed by Christopher Ragland, who obviously gets Blaylock’s brand of humor. I enjoyed his performance, and I thought it got better and better as it went on.

Poor narration makes book hard to judge

I can't fault the narrator during passages that were not the characters speaking. The voices adopted for the various characters seemed very contrived. Though and difficult to sort through. There were variations on raspy old man and high pitched adolescent boy and little else. The story itself was convoluted and the voices only made sorting things out that much more difficult.

In addition to the odd character voices the narrator mispronounces several words. I always find these jarring and I have to use context to determine what the word should have been.

I ran across this book in a search for steampunk novels. It is not a steampunk novel despite the use of flying submarines, machines designed to burrow to Pelucidar and bathyscapes, although one would think..... I'm not sure if this was a problem with Audible.com search algorithm or a misclassification.

Things are not as they seem and I went from thinking every character was completely mad to figuring out what was happening before too long, so I don't know that the narration can take credit for all of my dissatisfaction with this book.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful

By
"sarahharding3"
on
10-19-12

Very Odd

Having just finished this book, I find myself unable to really give you much of a summary. It it a very odd book, which seems to be set in cold war era USA, following the journey of a mentally unstable man on his journey to the centre of the earth. Whether anything is actually happening, or is all imagined is still a mystery. Even though the narrator is pretty good, I found myself switching off while listening and even when I was paying attention, I was not really following. The ending is also rather abrupt, but I found myself almost glad that it had finished, so I didn't have to listen anymore.

pop

We love coca cola right? I mean as a species, generally we do. Is it the sugar? the taste? the bubbles? Probably a combination of all those things. Well, this book is so full of prose - I mean SOOO full of prose, that the actual story is lost. I couldn't follow it, I didn't enjoy it and I laboured just to listen. Can I judge it fully - no. I could only listen entirely to the first part of the download, and that took determination.

What world were they living in? Who were the people? No introductions, just a lot of over cleaver assumptions that at some point you would just get it. It took too long and I was just fed up.

So why cola at the beginning? Because prose are great in a story when used to enhance something already special, like bubbles make a coke fizzy, but a coke they do not make. This story is all bubbles. If the flavour is there, and I'm sure it is, I couldn't taste it.